Computer software applications allow users to create a variety of documents to assist them in work, education, and leisure. For example, popular word processing applications allow users to create letters, articles, books, memoranda, and the like. Spreadsheet applications allow users to store, manipulate, print, and display a variety of alphanumeric data. Such applications have a number of well-known strengths including rich editing, formatting, printing, calculation, and on-line and off-line editing.
In computer-generated documents, tables are often used to represent information whose basic structure is repeated from row to row. For example, consider a table representing financial results of various companies. Each column may represent a specific piece of financial information, such as revenues, net profits, earnings per share, and the like, while each row may represent a different company. It is typical for each consecutive row in a table to follow the same structure as the previous row. That is, each consecutive row typically consists of the same number of cells, each of the same size and meaning as are contained in the previous row. Many prior art word processing applications take the number of cells and sizes of a previous row into account when creating a new row that is structurally similar to a previous row. That is, some prior art word processing applications allow for the automatic creation of a new row that contains the same number and sizes of cells as a previous row.
It has become desirable to annotate computer-generated documents with helpful structure such as that provided by the Extensible Markup Language (XML). User-defined XML markup may be applied to a given row in a table where the row or individual cells within the row are marked up with XML markup structure. Unfortunately, prior art word processing applications do not allow for the automatic creation of a new row in a table that contains a replication of the XML markup applied to selected or previous row. Therefore, the user must manually re-apply XML markup to a newly created row if the user desires that the newly created row have the same XML markup as the row from which the newly created row is replicated. It is known to copy and paste a previously XML-formatted row in order to create a new row containing the same XML formatting, but such a procedure is cumbersome, inefficient, and requires the user to review the pasted row to ensure that the XML-formatting from the previous or selected row has been properly applied to the newly created row.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.